Heroes of Graxia
Published by Petroglyph
Designed by Daniel Kroegel
Contents: 240 cards, six plastic miniatures, and a black-and-white rules sheet
2-6 Players
$34.99

Heroes of Graxia (HoG) is a new deck building card game
from Petroglyph designed by Daniel Kroegel. The game is set in the
home-brewed fantasy world of Graxia. Magic-wielding generals called
"Guardians" are the heroes who set out to recruit and arm their forces
to send into war against rampaging monsters, as well as the armies of
other players. Yes, that's right – there is finally a deck building
card game with more than just a smattering of player versus player (PvP)
interaction. PvP is a core element of HoG.

Gameplay
If I had to sum up gameplay in HoG for experienced gamers, it is
like playing a game of Thunderstone with your left hand, while
simultaneously drafting a Magic: The Gathering ("Magic")
deck with your right hand, while simultaneously playing that deck as you
are drafting it (presumably with some invisible telekinetic third hand). In short, there's a lot going on in the game and it takes up a lot of
space on the game table. Most cards in a typical deck building card
game are flashed to your opponent for a few seconds to execute
game-specific tasks, and then are thrown into a discard pile.
HoG differs from this design element in that you are constructing
an army on the board (called a "Legion") which remains on the table
until it's component elements are recalled by the owner or else are
destroyed by monsters or opponents' Legions. To an outsider, the
amassing and equipping of your Legion will look to gaming enthusiasts
like playing a creature-heavy Magic deck with plenty of creature
Enchantments.

HoG is not quite as fast to get setup as Ascension, but is
faster to setup and reset than Dominion or Thunderstone.
Players start out with a small standard deck of 12 cards, drawing a hand
of five cards. In the middle of the table there is a market made up of
three different decks: Spells, Legion Units, and Equipment. Four random
cards are turned from the top of each of these decks to create a
selection of potential things that players can buy and add to their
decks. A fourth smaller deck filled with monsters is added to the
table, and four monsters are flipped up.

Monsters cannot be bought, but are instead there to be attacked by the
players' Legions. Whenever a card is bought (or a Monster is
destroyed), a new card from the corresponding deck is flipped up to keep
four of each type of card on the table at all times. Unlike
Dominion or Thunderstone, which have a static selection of
market cards at all times, this combination of randomization and
categorization keeps a little of everything on the table all the time,
but requires constant reading and analysis on the part of the players.

Non-Monster cards have both a price to purchase and a gold-value that
they generate when they are discarded from hand on your turn. So, for
example, you might discard two cards worth a total of eight gold to buy
a card from the market that costs eight gold. Purchased cards go into
your discard pile, and when you run out of cards in your draw pile you
reshuffle your discard pile to form a new draw pile. Alternately, if
you don't use them for their gold value you can instead put non-Spell
cards into play, recruiting and equipping your Legion.

During your turn you can make as many purchases as you can afford and
you can take up to two actions. There's a long list of possible play
options, but one of the core actions is attacking a Monster or another
player's Legion. When Monsters are defeated they yield in-game rewards
to the victor, and then they are sent off to his Loot Pile – they are
not shuffled in to clutter up your deck as they are in
Thunderstone. Combat is fairly standardized, whether you are
attacking Monsters or Legions: Spells and combat-duration cards are
activated, then the attack and defense scores of the opposing forces are
compared. If your opponent has more attack than you have defense, your
troops take Wounds. If any Unit takes more Wounds than their Health
score they are destroyed.

When fighting another player, if you lose a Unit your opponent wins
Prestige. The game is played until one player has won a predetermined
number of Prestige points, or until there are no more Monsters to be
slain, whichever comes first. At the end of the game, players total the
Trophy values of the Monsters they have slain, the other cards they have
bought, and the Prestige points they have earned. The player with the
highest sum of these points wins the game.

It takes a concerted "no PvP" attitude on the part of the players to end
the game based on attacking Monsters alone. Typically what ends the
game is amassing Prestige points from attacking other players' Legions.
This means that there can be really wide variations in both the length
of the game and the feel of the game. My first game, where I was fairly
cautious about attacking, took two hours to win. That game focused more
on long-term deck building more than attacking. My second game involved
a number of rapid attack exchanges between me and the other players;
that game was finished in about forty-five minutes, with little time to
fine-tune our decks and Legions.

The game is generally fast-paced, but given that players can take at
least two actions on each of their turns and can also buy as many cards
as they can afford, there is some down time. The real down time comes
during PvP combats. The battling mechanic is very math heavy (primarily
adding and subtracting attack and defense modifiers). If you aren't
involved in a combat, you could sit on your hands for five minutes
waiting for a big battle to be calculated and resolved. This math can
result in what my friends and I like to call a "math tax". If you fail
to add up the values in your head before you declare an attack, or if
you fail to calculate for the twelve point attack/defense swing that
commonly occurs during combat due to the playing of Spells and
Mercenaries, you will take an absolute pounding for your
miscalculations.

One noteworthy but odd feature in the game is that when someone is
forced to pay the "math tax", the person who was defending tends to
score quite a lot of points by killing off the attacking Legion's units.
One big blunder plus one or two other active attack runs can end the
game pretty quickly. Other players' blunders can actually disadvantage
your relative position in the game's rankings more than in most other
games. To avoid the "math tax" you have to really scrutinize the other
players' cards. When you are going to attack another player there is no
sneaking up on them – you really have to stare at their cards for a
solid minute sometimes just to decide whether you will attack. The
result of this is that you either occasionally telegraph your attacks or
face the possibility that you'll pay the "math tax".

Components & PackagingHeroes of Graxia comes with a small assortment of plastic
miniatures. While they are certainly attractive, they serve no
significant function in the game since units don't move around the play
area. They are just a little bonus that's likely leftover from
Petroglyph's other new board game, Guardians of Graxia.
HoG really could use a small quantity of gaming stones to track
the use of "once per turn" powers, and so I'd much rather have seen the
miniatures removed and some counters added into the mix.

The game features 240 game cards. They are printed on nice card stock.
Some of the cards aren't cut with an identical die cut to the rest of
the cards. Particularly with the Spell deck, there are two distinct
sizes of cards that can occasionally make riffle shuffling mildly
problematic. The art on the cards, as well as the card trade dress,
looks great. The iconography is very intuitive. In Thunderstone
new players are baffled at what the purple circle stands for. Here, new
players can already start intuiting mechanics quickly based on a solid
trade dress.

One minor nuisance about the iconography is that the combat-related
icons are in a rectangular pattern instead of a straight line across the
bottom of the card. This makes it much easier to pick out a single icon
when you need it, but when you want to add up the relevant values for
combat you are doing a lot of scanning across the cards if there are
lots of modifier cards attached to a given unit.

The game comes in a small box that fits the cards snugly. When you see
the boxes for Ascension, Dominion, and Thunderstone you'll
think you are getting less for your money with HoG. At some
level that's true – there's no board, no fancy storage tray, and
certainly the 240 cards in HoG is less than the 530 cards in
Thunderstone. In part, the design mitigates this relative dearth
of cards. The core mechanic doesn't require all the card duplication
that drives Thunderstone and Dominion. The art in
HoG is also a step above Ascension and Dominion.
So, while you may not be maximizing your gaming dollar, you are still
getting a highly playable and very portable package, all for $5.00 to
$10.00 cheaper than these other games.

The black-and-white double-sided rules sheet is reasonably well written,
but does contain some vague areas. At least one rule was so poorly
worded that when the designer discussed that rule online he seemed to be
recanting part of his own rulebook. While the rules will get you
started, some of the cards (particularly the Spells), can raise
questions that the rules sheet just does not answer. This will require
some ad hoc house rules to keep the game going through these
ambiguities. If you don't mind occasionally filling in the gray areas
then you would rate the rules clarity higher than I would as a rules
lawyer who wants everything clearly spelled out.

ConclusionsHeroes of Graxia is a really interesting take on the deck
building genre. How well it will play for you really will depend on
your play group. If you are interested in building and tweaking your
deck and your buddies are interested in smacking you around, deck
building might have to take a back seat that game. This is definitely
not a guaranteed multi-player solitaire experience as deck-building
games can sometimes be. If you try to play the game with six players as
the game claims to support, you'll have to play on a football field with
players roaming around staring at each others' cards – significant table
space is required. With a reasonable gaming area the game pretty easily
accommodates three or even four players, though. If you are a fan of
deck building games and also like casual Magic drafting, this
could be a good addition to your gaming library. If you don't like the
idea of player versus player attacks and having your carefully
constructed plans thwarted, then this won't be a game for you.

For Retailers
Petroglyph is actively attending gaming conventions to support their
product, which is a good sign. However, they don't have a strong
internet presence to handle rules questions and promote this product.
HoG, for instance, doesn't even have a dedicated page link on
their company website, while Guardians of Graxia, their other new
release, does. While there is a HeroesOfGraxia.Com, the game's rulebook
is hard to locate even there. Petroglyph is primarily a video game
studio, and I suspect that they are experiencing some growing pains in
the hobby game market.

This game will probably have slower sales than the more heavily marketed
Dominion and Thunderstone. The PvP aspect of this product
really lets it scratch an itch that those games may not be able to
reach. If you want to sell this product you need to actively promote
that aspect, to some of your alpha gamers at least. If you are planning
on actively demoing the product, try to advertise the event to
Magic enthusiasts – you could pick up some quick sales of this
product. Given the occasionally intrusive math elements, I am not
certain HoG will appeal to Dominion purists who are
looking for 30 solid minutes of deck tinkering using more streamlined
core mechanics. The small package profile is portable, but may make
consumers contemplating a purchase feel like they won't get enough value
for their gaming dollar compared to other deck building games with
bigger boxes and more goodies inside.